The present invention is directed to techniques for organizing personal data of one or more users in a virtual storage space and more particularly for accessing the data from multiple network devices. Further the invention is directed towards sharing the personal data of a particular user with other users of the virtual storage space by transferring the data to one or more of a plurality of network devices belonging to the other users.
The advent of digital media like digital photographs, images, sounds and video made it easier to save most of our personal moments on digital storage devices like the memory space of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), laptops, PCs, mobile phones, Digital Video Recorders (DVR), MP3 players, camcorders, digital cameras, cable or Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and the like.
With the rise of such devices, it became imperative that people shared their personal moments with their family and friends. The need of sharing gave rise to client based applications, protocols, and standards such as Bluetooth® and infrared transmitters. These applications, protocols, and standards allowed users to transfer data from one network device to another that was in its vicinity. The type of devices that could be used was restricted to only those devices that had these applications installed on them. Also, the distance to which the data could be transferred was a limitation.
For example, if a user wants to send an image captured from his mobile phone to one of his/her friend's television set or DVR, the present technology falls short. Also to transmit data from the mobile device to the digital camera would require the user to connect his mobile to a PC or a laptop via wired interface or USB, download the data to the PC or laptop, and then connect the digital camera to the laptop via wired interface or USB cable to transfer the data to the digital camera. This process is very cumbersome and long. There exists no way of sending the data directly from a variety of network devices to a different set of network devices via the available network interfaces. In the given instances there exists no way of directly sending data from a mobile phone to a digital camera.
Though current innovations allow users to share photographs captured and uploaded from their mobile phones, it does not span the other types of network devices like television, Digital Video Recorders, laptops, digital cameras, camcorders and the like, secondly it is restricted to images only, does not cover the other types of data like audio, video, text files and the like.
In addition, to automatically transfer data to a network device or to share the data with the other users without user interaction has not been captured by the current technology.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system and methods for transmitting and sharing data such as media data including video, images, and audio files automatically among all types of network computing devices.